Time to pester (politely, but insistently) a librarian: Isabella Jackson and I have co-edited a new collection of essays. Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land, and Power has just been published by Routledge, and provides a gallery of fine scholarship from a great set of contributors. We look at the legal underpinnings of foreign control, land and infrastructure, networks, science, and at the endgame, the Japanese invasion and the triumph of the Chinese Communist Party. No, we have not covered everything, but we have, we believe, brought new scholarship and thinking to address some of the key questions.

01 Pär Cassel, ‘Extraterritoriality in China: What we know and what we don’t know’

02 Isabella Jackson, ‘Who ran the treaty ports? A study of the Shanghai Municipal Council’

03 Chiara Betta, ‘The Land System of the Shanghai International Settlement: The Rise and Fall of the Hardoon Family, 1874-1956’

04 Stacie Kent, ‘Problems of Circulation in the Treaty Port System’

05 Anne Reinhardt, ‘Treaty Ports as Shipping Infrastructure’

06 Shirley Ye, ‘River Conservancy and State-building in Treaty Port China’

07 Hoi-to Wong, ‘Interport Printing Enterprise: Macanese Printing Networks in Chinese Treaty Ports’

08 Douglas Fix, ‘The global entanglements of a marginal man in treaty-port Xiamen’

09 Robert Bickers, ‘‘Throwing Light on Natural Laws’: Meteorology on the China coast, 1869-1912’

10 Chris Manias, ‘From Terra incognita to Garden of Eden: Unveiling the prehistoric life of China and Central Asia, 1900-1930′

11 Dorothée Rihal, ‘The French Concession in Hankou: The Life and Death of a Solitary Enclave in an occupied city’

12 Jonathan J. Howlett, ‘The Communists and the Kailuan Mines: Eliminating the legacies of the treaty ports’

This collection grew out of a 2011 conference held at the University of Bristol, and funded by ESRC Grant RES-062-23-1057, ‘Colonialism in Comparative Perspective: Tianjin under nine flags, 1860-1949’.